Puppeteer vs Autify
Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.
Entry price
Free and open source
Open sourceQuote on request
Quote onlyWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Quote-based annual contracts sized by test runs.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Two-week free trial.
Open source
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Google · since 2017
Emerging
Autify, Inc. · since 2016
Strengths
- Small, fast, and very well documented for Chrome-specific work.
- First-class access to the Chrome DevTools protocol for performance tracing and coverage.
- Excellent at non-test jobs: PDF rendering, screenshots, scraping.
- Very low barrier to a first working suite — recording plus a managed browser cloud.
- Maintenance burden is genuinely reduced by the self-healing model.
- Covers web and native mobile from one vendor.
Limitations
- No test runner, assertions, retries or reporting — you assemble all of it.
- Chrome and Firefox only; no WebKit.
- For E2E testing specifically, Playwright is a strict superset. Choose Puppeteer only when you want a minimal automation library.
- No self-hosted option.
- Limited support for complex data-driven scenarios.
- Smaller international presence and support footprint than the US vendors.
Best for
Automation jobs that are not tests, or Chrome-only tooling where you want minimal dependencies.
Small QA teams that need automation without an engineering hire.
All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.